Comments on: SharePoint: Convert Folder Structures to Metadata

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:18:49 +0000

I feel your pain Chris, I have a similar situation I am addressing. Unfortunately mine is probably much worse. As an example I have a group that has one folder out on the file server that contains what they call their “Top Level” folder structure which consists of 19 folders. Another has 60 “top level” folders with another 1500 folders and 18,000 files under those.

Doesn’t sound too bad until you take a closer look and realize that under those “top” 19 there are an additional 560 folder and 13,000 files. And this is one of the smaller examples.

My plan at this point takes a number of approaches:

1. Does all that content really belong in SharePoint or is it “archival” type data (any doc over x number of years old). Because of database limits set on us we do not encourgae moving everything into SharePoint.
2. How much of that data is duplication. This one will be interesteing. I’m figuring probably 30% of the content is multiple versions of documents (note that this is a very conservative estimate).
3. Is using content types to categorize, group and filter a viable solution?

Still in the very early stages of this “little” effort.

We are looking at DocAves File Share Connector to see if it is a workable solution for accessing files on the file server and treating them as if they are in SharePoint. Initial testing went fairly well but the powers that be have to deccide on whether to spend the bucks or not.

By: Kerri

Kerri — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:37:03 +0000

First of all, are you talking about an existing document library or a migration? Either way, I think you need to analyze your documents and see if they relate closely enough to be housed in one library. Probably they should be broken up. I imagine that will clear up some of your top level folder issues. Then it is matter of inventory. What do you have in there, how granular do you want to be able to filter/sort? Layout your columns and start applying metadata. It will probably be a big job, but your user will gain a great deal of valuable insight into filtering and sorting as they work through it. It can be done in stages too, no need to exhaust them with the effort. Hopefully your end-user is a clear thinking, organized type who will grasp the concept quickly.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:22:42 +0000

Forgot to hit the reply notification…

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:21:11 +0000

So, this is great if the folder structure only has a folder and a subfolder level…what does one do with a DocLib with a very deep hiearchy of folders? Like 3 and 4 deep? I have a user who wants to move their whole Shared Drive onto SharePoint (which we encourage) but, it’s a HUGE Folder monstrosity. Any good strategies for organizing that type of migration?

By: Kerri

Kerri — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:51:35 +0000

Hi Paul, I have experienced that same issue. While I can’t pinpoint the exact cause every time, most recently I have found that if one of the documents in the list is checked out, or saved to a different format (.doc vs .docx or even .pdf) that it won’t let me fill all the way down. In those cases I have still been able to fill most of the metadata though, just by working in chunks, 10-15 at a time instead of filling the complete list. I have only encountered this problem with migrating documents too, not when the documents were native to that library to start with.

By: EndUserSharePoint

EndUserSharePoint — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:34:13 +0000

Good point, Paul. If you have time, I would appreciate an article on your migration and the things that went wrong, plus how you had to end up fixing them. Would be really helpful to many people. — Mark

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:09:37 +0000

People considering SharePoint, something to beware – if you have lots of documents to migrate. In MOSS 2007 using the datasheet view is not 100% reliable. We’ve found that many times SharePoint doesn’t allow you to do the drag-copy approach to entering metadata. It gives you an error. It means that you have to enter metadata using the one at a time method. Has meant a lot of compromise in the metadata we introduce.

By: Kerri

Kerri — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:00:44 +0000

Yes! Many thanks Eric!

By: marctrac

marctrac — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:31:52 +0000

Thank you so much Eric!

- Tracey

By: eric

eric — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:43:10 +0000

I pinged twitter and it seems that it should be doable with Powershell if you have server access. It has the capailities to query lists and loop through results. So you should be able to script something up that could query the items, find the folder values and set a metadata value.